The Coach as Culture Hero: What's so great about the guy with the whistle around his neck? There is surely no American archetype more preposterously overpraised at this cultural moment than the Coach.
Slate's Timothy Noah invites readers to "debunk the gauzy idealization of The Coach as font of all wisdom", and debunk they do. Examples include the The Cold War Coach, The Absent-Minded Coach, The Beer-Drinking Coach, and the Scholar-Athlete Coach.
At my Tennessee high school in the mid-1970s, the head football coach taught "Earth Science," which was a kind of physics without math for the slower kids. One day, several students confirmed, he declared without irony (an alien concept to him) that light travels faster downhill.